Month: July 2013

While Bob Myers and his crew were busy navigating the open seas of free agency and sign-and-trade negotiations, you can be forgiven if it escaped you that a shadow-crew—a small secondary or tertiary expedition—had slipped away from the mother-ship in two small dinghies some time ago.

Myers returned with the rich haul of the dynamically versatile Andre Igoudala. But for our parts, jsl and I were combing rocky inlets and peaty bogs and highland springs. The finds we were looking for were certain under-recognized single malt scotches. A venture quite oblique to the mother-ship’s, you might think, but as you’ll soon learn, the outcomes turn out to be curiously and strangely parallel.

Jsl returned with gold at once (someone with one eye-patch and a sullen glare must’ve handed him the torn and rumpled map to Treasure Island).

“Bruichladdich, the Laddie Ten Year Old,” he whispered in a solemn, blood-brother undertone.

Once jsl pressed the rumpled map into my own palm, I found the cache readily myself. But I hadn’t opened a single bottle until late last week. I wanted to wait until the mother-ship had completed her whole mission—so that we could all celebrate together.

Diverse nuances and variables of tone, each of which holds its own while augmenting all the others. Even though this is an unpeated Islay single malt, it still carries an air of peatiness that gives the whiskey its appreciable kick without ever throwing the whole out of balance.

Independence Day came a day late for the Warriors. In a matter of hours on July 5, the brutal contracts of Richard Jefferson and Andris Biedrins were wiped off the books and a marquee free agent, Andre Iguodala, passed up more money from other teams to join Golden State. Putting aside all the Dwight Howard hysteria (for a moment, it did look as if the Warriors had gained enough ground to land the off-season’s biggest prize), the move unquestionably makes the team better. Most encouragingly, it’s the type of savvy, complex, real-time transaction that was unimaginable during the Cohan era. The Warriors are now a franchise that players will take a pay cut to join — rather than a basketball wasteland that drives players to demand a premium.

When I was a kid growing up in Sacramento (long before the Kings), one day out of the blue my dad brought home a transistor radio kit for me. I put it together excitedly—with his help. And in short order it was humming along perfectly. I can still see the thin antenna line that I ran out between my bedroom window and its casement and then stapled high up on the outside wall to get the best reception.

That night as my fingers spun the dial, suddenly they riveted back to what I soon realized was the buzz of a crowd somewhere. I wouldn’t have needed anyone—not even my father—to have invented a pre-set button for me then. That one certain mark on the dial had already become indelible.